Sunday, July 10, 2011

1- The Cannabis Sativa was widely used, all over the word, for so many years! 2.800 BC it was used by the Chinese to extract fibers. The sails of the caravels used in the discovery of the Americas was made of Cannabis. Something arround 90% of the paper used in the world was made of Cannabis in the 19th century. The first jeans were also made of the fiber of it.

2- A miraculous plant? Almost. You can get more than 25 thousand essential products of the modern life. Clothes, shoes, beauty products, oil, chocolate, soap, paper, ink, fuel, and many others, which make Cannabis a very important raw material for the whole world.

3- Cannabis was always used as a religious instrument. Its seed were burned by priests in order to achieve mystical trances. Its recreational use started with the Greek, in the great feasts.

4- The industrial use of cannabis sativa was largely suffocated by an aggressive campaign to a direct competitor, the oil industry. In 1940, Henry Ford even produced a car with the fiber of the cannabis and moved by the oil from the seed plant. For subsequent years, American conservatives tried to stigmatize this plant, attacking the drug and its use, and started calling it Marijuana - a call to racism against Mexicans. The campaign resulted in the prohibition of cannabis sativa in the U.S.

5- In Brazil, the difficulties for the industrial use of cannabis came from a campaign of racist bias against marijuana. The Africans who arrived as slaves brought the seeds in their thongs and started meeting at night to smoke and sing. Scientists tried denigrate that habit, trying unsuccessfully to prevent its spread among whites.

6- Cannabis has great healing power. In China it was used as an anesthetic. Today, it is considered a great remedy for the nausea caused by chemotherapy.

It is also used to treat glaucoma and can be used against asthma and stress. Many AIDS patients use it to open the appetite and weight gain, increasing their strength to resist the disease.

7- Medical research indicates that cannabis is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol. Unlike these, it is harmless to others, it does not cause aggressiveness or emotional imbalance. There is no evidence of cannabis addicts at clinics in Brazil.

8- A prohibition on the use of cannabis has been the excuse for one of the most hypocritical of violence against citizens. Good people are treated as Ciminals and their tranquility is disturbed. The law sent at the Congress decriminalizing the user will be an important step to abolish this situation of Brazilian life. But the violence caused by the drugs traffic will only be minimized with the total liberation of cannabis.

9- Today, cannabis is planted in Hungary, France, Canada, England, Portugal, China and Spain. With genetic researches, Brazil could produce in three years, the seed of cannabis without the THC (the psychoactive principle) for industrial use.

10- Cannabis is an ideal raw material for a sustainable society. Unlike oil, it is a renewable resource and it is clean. Its cultivation requires no chemicals and has high production performance, it grows in a maximum of 110 days (and may be combined with other crops). Cannabis ecological principle favors the development of self-sustaining regions, with plantations and factories side by side.

The struggle for the industrial use with cannabis sativa, was adopted by international brands like Adidas, Guess, Calvin Klein is a flame of optimism for the sustainable future of the planet after the end of oil and its derivatives.

The fight for the legalization of cannabis that is smoked by millions of people is part of the advance of individual liberties, an marking the end of this century.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Ever felt like wasting your time while you sleep? As you could be doing a thousand other things instead of sleeping? Or even worse, ever felt as your internal clock didn't fit your schedule? Well, i did.

Since i was a kid, i always felt as my body was a little incompatible with the "normal life", it happens that i have a sleep-wake cycle of 28 hours instead of 24.
A common person sleeps 8 hours and stay awake for the other 16 hours, but i can stay up 4 hours longer.
It sounds great at first, doesn't it? Actually it is not, as time passed by i realized that sometimes i went to bed at 6 am, waking up at 2pm, and a few days later i was going to bed in the early afternoon.
It kind of messed up my life a bit, school was harder because i was always tired, my father kept bothering me, calling me crazy and telling me to have a normal life. But it was not my fault!

Some time ago i found something really interesting on the Internet. A guide to Polyphasic Sleep, teaching how to actually sleep well.
I made some research and tried to learn a bit more about sleep and how to use Polyphasic Sleep in my favour and i found some good information, of people teaching how to do it, posting about their experiences, giving us tips and stuff. At first i was a bit afraid of trying it, but a couple days ago i started my own schedule of Polyphasic Sleep.

I go to bed at midnight, sleep for 3 hours. Then at 7:40 i take a 20 minutes nap, then after lunch i take my second 20 minutes nap, and another 20 minutes nap 4.5 hours later.

It is working great! i never felt that good sleeping this little. You may be wondering how can i sleep only around 4 hours/day and go on with a normal life. No? Ah, OK. I was going to tell you anyways.

To tell you the secret, i have to quote the guide i read on lifehacks.com

"In the late 30's, a wealthy amateur scientist named Alfred Lee Loomis and his colleagues watched an EEG monitor for brain electrical activity during sleep, and they made a pretty remarkable discovery: there are actually five main parts to each of several phases of sleep. The main stage is called REM, and it is where most of the benefit of sleep comes from[...] You spend only 1-2 hours in REM sleep during any given night, and the rest is wasted[...]

One of the ways to force your brain into REM sleep and skip the other phases is to make it feel exhausted. If you've gone 24 hours without sleep, you might notice that you drift away into dreams straight from being awake. You goes instantly into REM sleep as a protection mechanism. So you have to train your body into entering REM for short periods of time through the day.This is how Polyphasic Sleep works. "

And that's just a little about Polyphasic Sleep, tomorrow I'll try to post a few schedules you could use.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Yay! My first blog, and my first post in my first blog. Well, I'm actually not a good writer, at least not in English which is not my mother tongue. I wish i had something really interesting to talk about here but it happens that I don't !
In my future posts i'll try to keep you entertained, because i think i can't get any worse than this.

Here goes a picture of my city for you. I love this place even though it is not the best place to live. It is called Vitoria(which translates into Victory in english).